Sunday, January 31, 2010

Underpants Gnomes of Mass Destruction

Fred Hiatt, untalented hack and editorial page editor of the Washington Post, has chosen to continue his series of bleat-outs from the losers, war-criminals, and just plain old criminals from the Bush-Cheney Administration with something from General Michael V. Hayden.

Former General Hayden was a big fan of spying on Americans without a warrant when he was head of the NSA and later the CIA. Now he a principal at the Chertoff Group, a security consultancy co-founded by former Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

As (Jeff) Stein notes, Kiriakou’s false statements about the efficiency of waterboarding instantly swept America’s mainstream media—in addition to ABC, they appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, NPR, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and numerous other media. How many of these sources will now acknowledge that the reports they propagated were false? Don’t hold your breath.~

We got it wrong in Detroit on Christmas Day. We allowed an enemy combatant the protections of our Constitution before we had adequately interrogated him. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is not "an isolated extremist." He is the tip of the spear of a complex al-Qaeda plot to kill Americans in our homeland.

I think "Tip of the Spear" is very funny but it is scarier than "Tip of the Iceberg", "Tip of the Hat" or "Tip of the Tongue".There is also a tradition of calling NZ farm dogs "Tip" because the tip of their tail is white. If a dog lived in, say, Mataura it would be "Tip of Mataura" which would not be scary, merely puzzling.There's a lot to think about in the scary names business.